Dr Tessa Stone

It’s been one hell of a start to the year, and how we’ve managed to get to March intact I’m not sure.  I’ve never known such genuine chaos and turbulence in the HE system.

In January I was just starting work on a strategic review of BrightsideUNIAID’s activities, and the picture was pretty bleak.  The end of Aimhigher will see us lose 13 regional partnerships, and a couple more university ementoring schemes were looking very shaky where the member of staff coordinating the project was facing redundancy.  At a time when the need for our support was arguably greater than ever, there were serious doubts about how it might be funded going forwards.

How much has changed in just three months.  It looks as if the Coalition’s wild miscalculation of the sector’s reaction to the cap on fees, and their subsequent desperate attempt to strengthen the hand of OFFA to prevent all HEIs congregating at around £9,000, will allow organisations like ours to breathe a sigh of relief.

As one Russell Group colleague put it to me recently, this could be an enormous opportunity for those of us working in Widening Participation; a chance to see real, long-term investment.  And for those who don’t have a WP ‘problem’ at admissions, the increased scrutiny on retention will be to the advantage of WP students, while all will benefit from attention paid to employability.

But if we’re at least feeling that the end of the world is not quite nigh, let’s not forget that in an ideal world, none of this should be necessary.  Our education system should equip all students for their future, in whatever direction it lies, and charities and universities should not have to plug that gap.  What’s ‘good’ for us in one sense highlights the serious malaise in the system – and for a taste of just how near the end of their tether many academics are, see the piece by my PhD supervisor, Professor Simon Szreter, in this week’s Times Higher Education on the breach of trust that really could take generations to heal.

I had a striking sense of déjà-vu on reading Thursday’s Guardian: ‘Elite universities still struggling to boost underprivileged intake’.  That headline could be a straight cut and paste from any of the last 10 years.  Have we really made so little progress, for all the activity and investment in widening participation?

Of course it’s more difficult to tell than articles like this suggest.  The piece does report that the benchmarks were adjusted again this year. That’s the fourth adjustment since they were first published in 1999, which does nothing but blur the subsequent heated debates.  What hasn’t changed is the fact that it’s still the universities who are being asked to explain their shortcomings, and while some of them do protest too much, not all of the onus for widening participation should lie with them.

If primary and secondary education have really improved and are meeting the needs of youngsters from disadvantaged areas then arguably universities can go back to the day job, while organisations like ours should find ourselves less and less busy, with ever fewer students lacking social capital, making ill-informed subject choices or course choices, lacking confidence and needing extra support.  Yet at the recent inaugural meeting of the Third Sector Forum – a group of charities and not-for-profits who work to encourage widening participation to FE and HE and access to the professions – it was clear that we’re all as busy as ever, and needing to expand our activities.

Not wishing to sound too much like a turkey voting for Christmas, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the goal for many charities ought to be their eventual demise.  I noticed the other day that the strapline for Women’s Aid– ‘until women and children are safe’ – makes it very clear that their work should be time-limited.  I like their thinking.  Planned obsolescence won’t work for all charity sectors, but it could serve as a useful reminder that solving the root causes of a problem and not just getting better at mopping up the consequences ought to be our ultimate aim.